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At Least We Have Cardinal Sarah

by Christopher A. Ferrara
April 26, 2017

Reduced to powerless isolation at the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (CDW) after Pope Bergoglio sacked all its members and replaced them with a passel of reliable liturgical progressives, Cardinal Robert Sarah has not refrained from commenting publicly on the disastrous impact of the Bergoglian agenda. The Cardinal does not identify its principal author, but at this point in the Bergoglian tumult anyone who is paying attention to the situation in the Church knows of whom he speaks. The world certainly knows, and it lavishes Pope Bergoglio with endless praise, including flattering magazine covers.

Touching on Pope Bergoglio’s obsession with making Europe safe for the mass migration of male Muslim “refugees,” Cardinal Sarah observes: “The Church is gravely mistaken as to the nature of the real crisis if she thinks that her essential mission is to offer solutions to all the political problems relating to justice, peace, poverty, the reception of migrants, etc. while neglecting evangelisation,” In that regard, Cardinal Sarah cites this remark by Yahya Pallavicini, an Italian Catholic who, tellingly, apostatized from the Faith and became a Muslim:

“If the Church, with the obsession she has today with the values of justice, social rights and the struggle against poverty, ends up as a result by forgetting her contemplative soul, she will fail in her mission and she will be abandoned by a great many of her faithful, owing to the fact that they will no longer recognize in her what constitutes her specific mission.”

Of course, it is not the Church that is mistaken in this obsessive focus on social justice issues rather than the salvation of souls, but rather its current earthly head and his handpicked collaborators — including the ones with whom he has surrounded Cardinal Sarah at the CDW in order to neutralize any attempt by him to restore some semblance of dignity to a liturgy that has “collapsed,” as the former Cardinal Ratzinger admitted.

In an ultimate sign of the world’s hearty approval of the Church of Social Justice which would appear to be replacing the Holy Catholic Church as Bergoglianism triumphs (for the moment), Pope Bergoglio was invited to give a TED talk from the Vatican, broadcast to a TED conference in Vancouver. (TED originally stood for Technology, Entertainment and Design at a single conference but has since evolved into a permanent organization that bills itself as “a global community, welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world.”)

CNN was pleased to report that in his 17-minute TED discourse — which said nothing about man’s eternal destiny or the need for conversion in order to be saved — “Francis did what he does best, delivering a plainspoken sermon on the importance of interconnection and tenderness. Essentially, he told the academics and innovators, scientists and techies, there is no ‘you,’ without an ‘us.’”

Interconnection. Tenderness. There is no “you” without an “us”. For this we need a Vicar of Christ­ — slogans that could have been uttered by Hillary Clinton? But, sad to say, this kind of thing is indeed what Francis does best. The current occupant of the Chair of Peter seems little interested in the job description of the papacy as opposed to establishing himself, always before the cameras, as the life coach to an unbelieving world. Even Jesus becomes a mere social justice prop, with Francis declaring to the TED audience via satellite feed that “God himself descended into Jesus to be on our level. This is the same path the Good Samaritan took. This is the path that Jesus himself took. He lowered himself, he lived his entire human existence practicing the real, concrete language of love.”

Jesus, the Divine Redeemer of fallen man without Whom no one can be saved from an eternity in hell, is thus reduced to a kind of super-social worker who merely took the same path as the Good Samaritan after God “descended into him.” The notion that God “descended into” Jesus would appear to pose a problem for the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Who is God Incarnate, a divine not a human person. But then, sound theology is of little account in this pontificate.

But at least, on a purely human level, we have Cardinal Sarah, who at this point is the lone (however muted) voice of opposition within the Vatican to the destructive phenomenon that can only be called Bergoglianism ­— from which, please God, the Church will soon be delivered.